Tag: C64

Commodore 64 (C64) Nostalgia Review: Karateka

Tan box with an Asian "warlord" character with headgear staring out at the viewer. Also staring out at the viewer is a western male protagonist with indeterminate hair color (brownish blond) in a white karate gi, and a blonde western female with her shoulder bare.
Insert: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karateka_(video_game) (You’ll also notice the “Westernized” protagonist and his love interest in an Asian themed game for the box art)

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, but based on the analytics, these are far more popular than I thought they would be. It seems there’s a lot of love for the C64 (as the Commodore 64 is affectionately known) and there are a lot of people in other countries that find these interesting at least, so I’ll continue doing them. Eventually, they will run out because I got all my C64 stuff via birthdays and holidays as the software was far too expensive for me to purchase with my own allowance as a child. Luckily, the C64 era spanned most of my tween and teen age years, so I have a fair amount of it that is pretty cool.

I actually want to talk about one of the ones that I enjoyed playing the most and a game that definitely inspired me as a child growing up in the 70s and 80s: a game called Karateka.

Karateka

So, Karateka was made by Jordan Mechner who also made a video game called Prince of Persia (PoP), which is now a currently dormant, but major, franchise owned by Ubisoft. At the time, however, I didn’t know about PoP, but as I was in to all things Martial Arts as a child, somehow I discovered this title and I thought it was absolutely awesome.

The gist of the game is that an evil warlord (Akuma) has kidnapped your one true love (Princess Mariko)and you had to fight through various warriors in the evil warlord’s palace to get her back. Yes, the damsel in distress trope was common in the games of the era. However, was was unique was the range of moves and motions that your character, the Karateka (which means, practitioner of karate as far as I’m aware), had available to him. Remember, this is years before a game like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. Games were lucky if there protagonist remotely resembled a person (I’m looking at you, the “cursor character from Adventure), so to get a human character who could punch, kick, and move away realistically was absolutely fantastic!

Action, Adventure, and a Little Chess-like Strategy

The game starts with you pulling yourself up onto a rocky crag where the evil warlord’s palace begins and you fight your first enemy. Your enemy is basically a “white belt” beginner and the challenge increases in terms of timing, moves, and belts as you delve deeper and deeper into the warlord’s palace. Along the way, there are eagles that you have to defeat with a well placed kick, otherwise they will attack and take valuable life away from you–life you’ll need to get through the ever-increasingly difficult fighters that lie in wait.

The game very much relied a timing system. It took your character a set time to throw a punch or a kick and it took the enemy a set time as well. However, as the enemies became more difficult, I remember their timing becoming slightly faster, although that could have been just memory–if I’m misremembering that, my apologies. One thing I know for sure, however, is that the enemies’ life increased dramatically as you went on. As you only had one life (yep, this was the era of one life games), this made it incredibly tense and super important not to get hit and squander one of your valuable life arrows (which went down in increments, if I remember correctly–no, I think it could go down in increments or if you caught a powerful punch/kick it could go down a full life arrow).

I found the instruction insert to the game and here are some of the strategies/story given:

“You can withstand only a limited number hits. The rows of arrows across the bottom left of the screen tells you how many. Every time you get hit, you lose one arrow. If your last arrow disappears, you die . . . As long as you avoid getting hit, your arrow supply will be replenished. Every guard has a different headgear and fighting style. As a rule, the guards get tougher as you advance into the palace. When you kill a guard, take advantage of the opportunity and run forward. Watch for danger when you’re standing or running. In these positions you’re vulnerable to attack — one well-aimed blow could kill you!”

Karateka Getting Started Insert

You Think the “SoulsBorn” Games are Hard?

It was incredibly difficult to go through the entire game. There are a couple of “traps” that you had to watch out along the way. I remember getting to one of the traps, a gate, and being stymied for literal months as to how to get through. It was only by happenstance one day where I was running and remembered the gate at the last minute and I “decoyed” the trap (yes, I don’t want to spoil this even though it is nigh on 30 years old at this point and no modern machine outside of emulators can even run this game properly). From there, I knew it could be done, but it was figuring out the parameters of the gate and its timing. I got to where I could pass it reliably, but it was still months before I would see the end of the game, after getting by another “trap” as well. This second one, I didn’t think was fair, and it also broke the internal logic of the game to me, as if it was “true,” it made no sense to me as to why/how the Princess could have been captured. This was a classic twist, that while surprising, didn’t really work with the fiction of the narrative and probably my first time figuring out that games functioned differently than other novels. There was a narrative/narrative rhetoric in what the story was doing, but there was also a procedural rhetoric (although I wouldn’t know the term until studying my PhD here at MTSU) in what the code was doing.

While the code/coding didn’t break the game and was entirely consistent with the concepts of “gameplay,” it most certainly broke the narrative, and showed the duality behind the game. You can have narrative structure and/or gameplay, but they aren’t at all the same and can be, at times, at odds with each other.

Favorite Game?

This was one of my favorite games as child, easily within my top 5. Was it my favorite game of all time? That I can’t say, but it was one that I finished as a child, and for a game this difficult, this was no small feat. It is also a game in which I was dedicated, I used problem-solving, and had a little bit of luck to see the gate’s “pattern/trick.” If this wasn’t my favorite game as a child, it was certainly close. I still remember the sweaty palms as I made my way into the inner sanctum of the palace with only a handful of life arrows remaining. Would I have enough skill or would my journey end at the hands of a combatant with way too many life arrows?

Karateka was an absolutely perfect game for my childhood. It had everything that I wanted in a game, compelling story, cool martial arts, and a new and unique (for the time) setting. It also had everything I needed as it was a well crafted game that rewarded patience over rushing in and a measured, tactical approach to combat so as to help one to utilize problem solving skills and timing.

I think this is probably one of the games that I consider formative to both me as a person and me as a gamer. Without Karateka, I don’t know that my love of games that require strategy and patience, like the original Tomb Raider games would have developed and blossomed as it has, so hat’s off to Jordan Mechner. We always talk about art inspiring and moving people, and I can definitely say that Karateka had an effect on me as a human being. For those who say video games aren’t art, well, you’re welcome to your own opinion, but essentially, you’re only looking at one dimension of games–the procedural one. Computer code is 1s and 0s, but just as novels are more than the words written on the page, so too, this game is much more, to me, than the sum of its parts.

Sidney

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Commodore 64 (C64) Retro View: FIST II: The Legend Continues

A man in blue kung fu pants with a red sash around the waist and no shirt is kicking over a gray bowl and wooden table in what appears to be an outside training area or dojo with the words Fist II The Legend Continues in a stylized font.
Image Source: https://www.giantbomb.com/fist-ii-the-legend-continues/3030-20199/

Continuing my semi-nostalgic and semi-informative series of posts looking at the game games that informed my childhood, today I’m going to take a look at another (not very well known) martial arts game that caught my eye. Like one of the other games I looked at earlier in the same vein, this one did not really make all that much of an impression on me and I barely remember it.

Fighting Your Way Across the World

Or, at least, that’s what the various websites say when I looked them up to remind myself of the game. Looking at the various screenshots, I only remember one or two of them–and I think that’s because they are early in the game. In researching the game for this retroview, I discovered a possible reason for me not getting very far–it seems there was a random bug that would respawn enemies every time you defeated an enemy, making progression difficult. I honestly cannot remember if that’s what happened in my case, but I do remember not getting very far on the game.

A Martial Arts Dark Souls Game

Okay, not really. Probably not even close. However, I roll my eyes with today’s gamers who look to the Dark Souls games as the epitome of “hard” games. They have no conception of buying a game for either Christmas or your Birthday and then not being able to get through it due to byzantine game design or (if the above is true) a bug in the code, and then having to struggle through because that was the only new game you were likely to get for months. Games like Fist 2 were those type of games.

Honestly, I only remember the very first area and the ground level of the dojo. I think that’s as far as I every made it.

Karateka and World Karate Championship

The more I’m watching the YouTube video, the more I think that I had the bug that kept respawning enemies. I say this because I remember buying it because it mixed the adventure and exploration of Karateka (by Jordan Mechner or Prince of Persia fame) with the overall combat style of World Karate Championship, which were, at the time, two my favorite games. However, I remember a lot more fights in the first area than just the one that occurred on the video.

I also do remember the distinctive walking style of the hero along with the music, which has a lot in common with music from westerns, but also does have an eastern flavor to it as well.

This game had a lot of potential, but it wasn’t realized due to poor programming (we make fun of glitches and such now, but older games became downright unplayable in certain situations and that I think that’s this is why this is a forgotten game for me–it was one that I have almost no recollection of having played even though it would have been a sizable investment with my limited money. Such a shame as the game seemed like it had potential.

Sidney

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Retro Nostalgia Review: Elite for the Commodore 64

Animated Gif showing several aspects of the game. Firing Lasers, Docking, Galaxy Map, etc. Text in German.
Image Source: https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Elite (German Text)

No joke–Elite is probably my most favorite game (retro) of my childhood-if it isn’t my favorite, then it is among my favorites. I can’t tell you how many hours I put into the game and how much I’ve learned from the game based on playing it. Now, there’s a game out right now, called Elite Dangerous for modern PCs and consoles that is the “spiritual successor” to Elite, but don’t be fooled. This isn’t the Elite I’m referring to–no, no, I’m actually referring to the one, the only, and the original game published in the 1980s.

It was so popular and well known that there is an entire wiki-site dedicated to it on C64: https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Elite.

This gameplay video gives a pretty good representation of what the game is like and how it plays:

From: YouTube

Space Trading

Basically, you created a pilot and took control of a star ship that was docked at a space station. While I remember a “pack-in” novellette for the game, I can’t remember exactly what the story was about, although I think it set-up what would be called today as the game’s “lore” and “world-building.” This is one of the those games that I was able to buy because I “bent” the rules and was able to successfully demonstrate the educational value of the title. And it was actually educational–I learned how the “stock market” and “futures market” worked from the trading part of this simulation.

While you could engage in combat, either as a pirate or a mercenary, right from the game’s opening moments, this was actually the harder way to play as your beginning ship had minimal weapons, shields, and almost no accessories. While you might luck up and find a juicy and slow freighter, it was far more likely that you’d find some relatively good AI ship with decent armaments and would be space debris minutes after setting out on your vigilante (or criminal) career. Far safer was the option to trade and slowly build up your credit balance in order to afford new shields and weapons and to buy handy-dandy accessories like a fuel ram scoop (for harvesting fuel from suns) or a docking computer (docking in Elite was no joke and not for the faint of heart–get it wrong, and well, space debris).

Each station, however, listed a price for certain goods. These prices fluctuated depending on the station and the goods. Just like in real life, you were always looking to buy low and sell high. When done right, you could make a “killing” just by having bought large quantities of a product at a low price in one station and selling it for a substantial markup in another (side note: this is what most retailers do when they get products from their wholesalers/distributors. I don’t know what the mark-up is for every product, but for books and magazines, there’s about a 50% mark up in price–that’s where stores make their profit). And I learned about the concept of mark-up (& buy low/sell high), not from an econ. textbook, but from this game.

Space Combat

Okay, so now that you’ve got some money (& ship upgrades) under your belt, space combat actually begins to be feasible in the game. As mentioned before, you have two main paths open: hunt bounty targets and destroy them for their bounties (while scooping up any floating cargo now that they’re space debris) or go full pirate and destroy any ship that gets into your crosshairs–which will bring the game’s version of the police down on your head.

This is a “space sim,” meaning that inertia is a thing and the ship behaves like a real ship in space would. There are dogfights, but they are more along the lines of Battlestar Galactica (new) or The Expanse rather than Star Wars. At least that’s the way I remember them. Spoilers for a very old game, but there were even a “race” of evil aliens that would attack periodically and swarm you–you basically had to have the very best weapons and shields in the game to withstand them.

You could even go to other universes, although this took a lot of money and I was only able to do this once because the grind was insane.

“Open World” Game — Before the Modern Concept of Open World

I recently discovered that there were many more “universes” programmed into the game. The Universes were modeled on our galaxy and had a ton of systems, stars and stations to explore. However, there was no real visual variety–outside of the ships, which all had names of snakes for some reason–there wasn’t much of a distinction between one system or another, or even one universe or another, outside of the different names.

Still, this level of fidelity and openness was impressive at a time when consoles still couldn’t manage a one-to-one parity with their more glamorous arcade brethren. However, the ability to point your ship in a direction and fly there/hyperspace there was incredible and gave the game and the world and openness to it that I’d never really seen before.

To say I put hundreds of hours into this game would be accurate. Unlike Starflight, which had many of the same ideas and gameplay elements (although if I remember, combat was more along the lines of Star Trek, but I could be misremembering as I did not play it much), this game really captured my imagination and I pretended that I was a starship captain and even though I have played and own Elite Dangerous, nothing has ever come as close to fulfilling my desire of being my own starship captain as much as Elite has (Star Citizen has the potential whenever it is “officially” finished and released, but right now it is really only a “promise”). Elite is easily in my Top 10 games of all time and I think it was an absolute masterpiece and I’m glad I got to play it (it was a British import to America, after all).

Sidney

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RetroView: Commodore 64

Commodore 64 with monitor, disk drive, and datasette recorder
Image Source: https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/01/07/37-years-ago-today-the-commodore-64-debut-at-ces-vintagecomputing-retrocomputing-commodore/

The Commodore 64 (or C64) was my first computer. My best friend had a VIC-20 which was an earlier, precursor model to the C64 by the same company. The numbers represented the amount of RAM for each of the computers (as I recall). The C64 was notable in that it had 64K (yes, 64 Kilobytes) of RAM, a fairly large amount at the time. I got my C64 in either 1983 or 1984. I’m a bit fuzzy on the year because I got my first video game system, The Atari 2600 a year prior, so I think the dates were 1983 (Atari)/1984 (C64), but I could be off slightly–in any case, it was definitely in the 1983-1984 time period (1982 was the World’s Fair in Knoxville, TN where I first discovered “arcade” games and where my passion for gaming and all things video game related was born–it was only after that blossoming interest that my parents decided to spend the money on–what at that time might only have been a “fad”).

The “Educational” Machine

I got my computer for Christmas, although I got to go to the Hills Department Store (there’s a blast from the past that’s no longer around) and picked it out. I also got a Datasette tape machine to go with it–to load and save programs (the datasette was a cassette tape recorder which could save programs or could load them as well). It was abysmally slow–taking upwards of 5-10 minutes to load even the most basic of programs–these were after all 30 minute cassette tapes that were being read just like a music cassette tape. My parents sprung for a C64 Floppy Disk drive the next year.

I was given the computer with the stern caveat that it was only for use for education and any “games” that I might get for it could only be educational. This actually lasted for a good while–well up into the beginning of high school (1987-1988), although even before that time, my parents had begun to relax that restriction. I also began to find “creative” ways of stretching the definition of “educational.” At first, I stuck fairly close with “edutainment” titles like In Search of the Most Amazing Thing, but later I began to be more creative, such as justifying the purchase of the text adventure game The Tracer Sanction and the road racing game Great American Cross Country Road Race.

Learning BASIC, Yearning for More

One of the things that I really got to do was learn the programming language BASIC really well. My elementary school also had a C64 and I was able to use it very well and became the defacto computer guru of the school. I wrote a small program that “interacted” with parents on a “Parents’ night” we had at the school. I was able to do that because the C64 users manual had the basics (pardon the pun) of BASIC and there were plenty of resources (magazines and new computer books in the Children’s Department of the library) devoted to learning BASIC. And basic could do some impressive things–In Search of the Most Amazing Thing was written in BASIC on the C64 (and so was Temple of Apshai–I know because I “peeked” at the code to try to decipher what those two games were doing “under the hood.”

However, the games that I really wanted to do (high graphics games and projects) were written in machine language. The C64 manual didn’t really cover this, offloading it onto another (fairly expensive) book. I couldn’t really afford it on my paltry allowance–but I really did want it. My uncle finally found a low-cost substitute at RadioShack, but by then, the whole machine language craze had pretty gone by the way side (Apple IIs, IBM PCs and the beginning of MacOs/DOS was taking over–I saw & used my first Mac and Apple computers in high school, but it would be several years yet before I saw my first true PC). Not including some sort of “machine language” programming book was truly a mistake as it kept kids like me, who couldn’t afford the true programming “tome” from really cracking the intricacies of the machine and getting into the guts of programming (although I’ve since learned that Commodore–the company–made a lot of egregious mistakes, but as a child, I knew none of this).

Not Without Its Problems

The C64, while being one of the most popular computers of its era, still had its share of issue. One major one being the power supply. My C64’s power supply died after 3 years–on Christmas day, no less, just as we were playing some of the new games on it. F15 Strike Eagle by Microprose was the offending game as I recall (I’d managed to snag that one by arguing that it was a “simulation” and I was learning about flight and flight models through playing it–I’m sure they saw through it, but they let me get it, so hey, I’m not complaining. It took a while for us to find a repair shop–in the strip malls above Northgate Mall here in Chattanooga.

We took it there and it took about a month (maybe less, two-three weeks?) to repair–probably just to order and ship in a new power supply. This one lasted for a several years and then it too died. However, this time the computer market had moved on, so computers weren’t prohibitively expensive (at least not Commodores). While most of the world moved on to Apples and PC clones, we decided to replace the C64 and did so with a C64c, a redesigned variant of the original C64. This one lasted until I quite a while, but as I couldn’t really do anything on it (too limited–it could on run GEOS, the Commodore answer to MacOs, but not well and I didn’t have a printer to print out school papers, nor could any of the school computers read the GEOS files even if they could have used the 5.25 floppies, which they couldn’t because the standard by then were the smaller 3.5 floppies.

The End of an Era

My grandmother had to buy me a new computer over Christmas Break of my first year in college. She bought an IBM PC clone (a 386sx Packard Bell on sale at Sears) and a Dot Matrix Printer. While not nearly as great as my C64–let me tell you, I have some things to say about Packard Bell computers, and none of them very nice–it still did the job in terms of allowing me to get my papers and school work done.

It also, luckily, had a modem. So I was able to experience BBSs and more importantly, use that experience to navigate the new burgeoning “online” world and navigate onto the “World Wide Web” for the first time (thus, becoming a savvy internet user in its infancy–for the public, at least). The C64 suffered as I rarely used it anymore and only my uncle would occasionally use it to play the “Gold Box” Advanced Dungeons and Dragons RPGs that I “convinced” them to let me buy. He got our respective parties to the “final” boss fight, ready to challenge the evil minions for the last time before he succumbed to cancer.

Although the C64 holds some of the greatest memories of my life (from carrying the box out of the Hills Department Store to the car on one joyful Saturday afternoon, to being considered a tech guru because I could load up my friends’ favorite games on the system at school, to finding a hidden love of databases and relational data through creating a miniature computer catalog with a database program and looking for hours at graphs, charts, and breakdowns of the books that I owned, my C64 was companion that I will never forget, yet I have not been able to shake its final memories for me of my uncle and his last days with the system. I’ve not been able to take back out since (it is still up in the attic in its box along with the Disk drive). Maybe one day, I’ll be able to associate it with good memories again–but right now, all I can think of are the two teams waiting at the edge of the doorway, waiting for a battle that will never come.

Sidney

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Commodore 64 (C64) Nostalgia Review: Starflight

starflight_cover_digital_antiquarian
Spaceship on a star field, cover for Starflight.  Image Source: The Digital Antiquarian (click for more Information)

  • Project Paradise Word Count: 357
  • Project Skye Word Count: 1617
  • Project Independence Word Count: 1723 
  • Project Ship of Shadows Graphic Novel Page Count: 12

As you can see, I didn’t manage to get any writing done Friday or Saturday.  I didn’t even feel well enough on Friday to get out a blog entry–sorry about that.  I’m still also trying to fine-tune my “process.”  I think I have too many projects, especially since Summer classes are about to start and they tend to be these intense periods of “crunch” time because you’re trying to cover a semester’s worth of stuff in 4-8 weeks.  I trying to decided if Project Skye or Project Independence is the one I want to focus on for May and then I’ll shift the other for June.  I do want to keep working on the graphic novel in the “background” (on weekends?), but I’m not really sure when to fit this in.  I’ll cogitate on it and try to decide on a course of action in the next two weeks before school starts.

Late to the Game

I’m not sure that I have all that much to talk about when it comes to Starflight published by Electronics Arts (before their rebranding as EA.  This was an early space ship explorations/simulation game, heavily inspired by TV shows like Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica (the OG shows, not the newer modern reboots.)  In it, you controlled a spaceship and chose which worlds to visit and explore.  As I recall, you could choose destinations and fly your ship there, land on planets, and (I believe) scavenge for resources and discover aliens.  Just browsing through the manual, it looks like you could create, train, and utilize crew members on your ship.

starflight-commodore-64-screenshot-configuring-your-ship
Screenshot, Image Source: Moby Games

Uncharted Territory

As i mentioned above, I don’t really recall that much about the game.  It would probably have been one that I played and enjoyed and would have probably been one of my favorites, except, as I recall, Electronic Arts didn’t publish this on the C64 right away.  If memory serves, this was a PC game that absolutely “blew up” in popularity.  It wasn’t talked about so much outside of gaming circles, but from what I remember, this was “hot stuff” in the world at the time.  The C64 port came sometime later and people think that modern day Ubisoft “downgrades” graphics are bad (i.e., shows an enhanced game during their presentations of the game and then “downgrades” the graphics so that the game will actually run on current hardware), but the game’s graphics were truly watered down–so much so, that my uncle nicknamed the main character sprite/avatar “Caspy” after “Casper the friendly ghost.”   

starflight_02
“Caspy.”  Image Source: Lemon64.com

More Time and Space

Unfortunately, this meant that I didn’t get the game until the very end of the C64’s life-cycle in our household.  By then, CD-Rom systems like the Sega Saturn and Sony Playstation were beginning to be talked about in the gaming magazines, and the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo ruled the roost at that time (if memory serves), so a hack-and-slash game like  Golden Axe was more in-line with what I was playing at the time and I didn’t really devote a lot of time to “Caspy” and his adventures (even though I’m a spaceship sort of guy.). I don’t want to turn off modern gamers, but I remember it being a old-school version of No Man’s Sky (which I actually don’t think is as bad as everyone who hates on it, says it is–it’s just slow and more about survival.)  I would actually have kept my copy had I not been in grad. school–I realized that even though I would be able to tolerate it and have some fun with it, but it just took too long to do anything and that I just didn’t have the time to invest in learning its systems and getting really good with them.  That’s sort of how I felt when playing Starlight.  Electronic Arts really should have had a port ready for the C64 much sooner–or if they did, they needed to have advertised it better so that I could have made it a priority Christmas/Birthday request.  As it was, it was a good game that I just didn’t get to put a lot of time into because the “gaming” world had moved on by the time I got to it.  I could only find a DOS play through and not a C64 play through.

Here’s hoping you have a good week!

Sidney

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C64 Nostalgia Review: Knights of Legend

Knights_of_Legend_Indie_retro_news
Knights of Legend Box Cover Art (A warrior raising a sword and shield).  Image Source: IndieRetroNews.com (Click for more info)

A Birthday RPG

I cannot quite remember how I heard of Knights of Legend by Origin as a child.  It was either through an article or advertisement in a magazine that I bought at Waldenbooks called Computer Gaming World (CGW), although it could have been in a different magazine–I just can’t recall.  Regardless, I read either the article or adcopy (no internet/interwebs for public, only military/government at the time), and thought it was neat.  There was a go-to place that I found that would do mail-order for Commodore 64 games that I’d ordered from in the past, so I asked for this for my birthday.  I remember it coming on-time and after I got back from school and had dinner, cake, and ice-cream, I remember opening up the game and diving in.

The game came packed with 6 (!) floppy disks and a packed-in insert exhorting owners (of the IBM/IBM compatible versions) to get a hard drive and install it on there (a review I found said it had 4 disks, but I remember 6, though perhaps I’m wrong–I’ll check when I get home and revise this as necessary–regardless, it had many more than was normal for the time).  Now, understand, most games came on one floppy disk.  Sometimes the game might use front and back to store the floppy, but two disks were rare.  Some of the most intensive games out there used two disks and if they were really, really pushing the capabilities of the system, they might use up to 3-4 disks (for some reason, I’m thinking of the AD&D Gold Box games here), but for a game to need 6 disks was practically unheard of at the time.  Unfortunately, the C64 was older tech and did not have the option of adding a hard drive, something that was just starting to take hold in the PC/IBM computing space of the time, so I had to make do with the floppies.

Unique Races

Now, when I looked up this game on Wikipedia, I was fairly shocked to find that very few outlets seemed to have covered it and that it had an abysmal rating in the few outlets that did give it a look.  I (ultimately) thought it was a bad game (more on this in a moment), but I didn’t think (at least initially) that it was all that bad.

One of the things that this game had going for it was that it had (from what I recall), a fairly unique set of races.  What the game did was combine the RPG systems of race and class into one, so that whatever you picked determined your profession.  Some examples: a Kelden Cliff Guard, a Ghor Tigress, or a Klvar Elf (a magic-user).  Each one of these is example of a race/nationality combined with a type of class to get your profession (fighter, magic-user, etc.).  At first, creating a class seemed really fun and unique and it occupied my time during the rest of the school year.  It wasn’t until the summer vacation/break that I was really able to dig into it and discover its flaws.

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Knights of Legend Screenshot.  Image Source: Indie Retro News.

Encumbrance and Fatigue System No Bueno

The real problem, I soon discovered when I tried to actually do anything is the problem that the game’s designer, Todd Mitchell Porter was 1) far too ambitious with the ideas that he implemented in the game for the technology of the time and 2) confused complexity with fun.  The game’s manual (which I’m holding in my hand as I write this post) is a whopping 142 pages in length.  (There are actual RPGs from that era that are shorter than this manual–yes, I acknowledge that they were mostly “home-brew” RPGs by amateurs or very small RPG companies, but still, the fact remains true).  I once had a professor note, as I had once praised a piece of criticism that was very long-winded, that just because it is long and involved, doesn’t necessarily make it good.  That’s the way that I feel about this game in hindsight.  Teenage me loved the sprawling “epicness” of the game for the sheer possibilities that it seemed to offer, but in actuality, the game collapsed under the weight of its own systems.

Case in point–the fatigue and encumbrance system.  Once you got out of the character creation system and outside of the town, into the wilds and into combat, that’s when the game fell apart.  The game used a “hit location” system, meaning that limbs could be incapacitated without killing the body and your characters were “flimsy” meaning that the weakest of strikes could render them critically injured, so the best strategy was to wear the heaviest armor you could find.  However, you could carry only so much, so that you’re armor and weapons weighed you down and every time you took an action, you became more and more fatigued until you couldn’t fight and had to rest.  In combat, this came to down to two results: 1) wear too light of armor and getting your party decimated or 2) wearing too heavy of armor and having your characters able to withstand encounters, but leaving you too fatigued to swing your weapons.

I once had a Kheldon fighter (who had wings and could fly), fly up to his opponent to attack, but after flying, he became exhausted and had to rest each and every turn because his weapons and armor kept him from recovering enough to do anything and the enemy slowly battered him to death.  I did win a couple of battles, but on the whole, I discovered that the entire system was broken because it prioritized “realism” over “fun.”  The possibilities that had seemed endless when I bought the game and when I was just creating characters, turned out to be limiting and frustrating when one actually played the game because of the way the systems interacted with one another.  Just because something works a certain way in real-life, doesn’t mean it should work that way in a game.

Needless to say, the game didn’t really receive a whole lot of attention after that summer. I dabbled with it here and there, but for the most part, it was back to AD&D Gold Box games until I got my first PC where I tried another Origin game, Wing Commander II by another visionary developer, Chris Roberts, that I found more to my liking.  But that’s another blog post, for another day.

Sidney

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A Bibliophile’s Dream: Data Manager 2, Goodreads, and Library Thing

 

bibliophile_by_breath_defying-d3970il_deviantart_com
Bibliophile by Breath_Defying on DeviantArt.com (Click on Picture for more information)

So, I’ve always been a bit of a bookish person.  Okay, who am I kidding, I’m an unabashed bibliophile–I love books in all their glorious forms.  Ebooks, print books, trade paperbacks, mass market paperbacks, hardcovers, books with dust covers, books without dust covers, magazines, graphic novels, comic books, spiral bound books, zines, etc.  If it has existed in printed form, I’ll probably love it if I get to see it. In fact, the first two places that I’m liable to visit in any new situation are the bookstores and the libraries of that town, place, or school.  Technology has made reading easier and disseminating print quicker and faster.  One day I might do a blog entry about that, but today I really want to turn my attention to the cataloging of books/media and some of the fun ways that I’ve done it over the years.

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Data Manager 2, Image Source: Terapeak

Data Manager 2

This is the first database program that I ever discovered.  I’d been using a pen-and-paper system before I discovered this program, but once I found that I could create record using the title, author’s name, publisher, genre, etc., I was in “hog heaven.”  I quickly converted my records into computer format and spent hours looking at the “Reports” function which combined the best of graphing functions of a spreadsheet program with a database program.  I loved comparing authors that I had, series, or most importantly genres to see where they ranked with others that I owned.  Great fun for a bibliophile!

Goodreads

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Goodreads Logo, Image Source: List Challenges (Click for more info. on List Challenges)

After Data Manager 2, I flitted from database to database on the various computers that I owned, but none seemed as satisfying as DM2.  As much as rail against the whole Web 2.0 paradigm, it did bring in one good thing: Goodreads.  In many ways, it is a combination between a book database and a social networking site centered around books.  I have about half of my collection listed on GR along that with being a “GR Author” meaning that any of my works that are published in book form (not online) should show up (I say should because, with the variation on my name, some of the books that I’m listed in aren’t actually showing up–those periods and commas make a difference).  I really GR, but find that sometimes it is too “Facebook” for me and I actively resist all the social/community features that it pushes.  It has a yearly reading challenge that I like to participate in and you can really go in-depth on the types of books that you read at the end of the year with a year-end round up (pretty snazzy).  They also have an app that will scan your books’ barcodes and add them to your collection, but too be honest, I think the web interface is much more intuitive.

Library Thing

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Library Thing Interface with Book Covers, Image Source: Am Reading (Click on image for more information about Am Reading)

The second major site that I found is Library Thing.  It is also a Web 2.0 paradigm site, but it focuses (in my opinion) more on the books aspect rather than the social aspect.  Make no mistake, it has social/community features galore, but for some reason, whenever I’m there, I feel the focus is on books first, community second unless you really want to make it a community focused site.  I don’t have nearly as many of my books listed there, about a 1/10th of my collection, but I’m adding books there on a weekly basis.  I love that you can order the books by “shelves” (which you can also do on GR) and that you can print out a listing of books (or just the covers) by the shelves that you set up.  They also recommend books to read based on your shelves (again, GR does this as well).   One thing that I liked that came too late for me to use is TinyCat, a mini-library interface that you can checkout books with (sort of a mini-circulation module).  This would have been perfect for my classroom library when I was a 6th grade teacher, but it was implemented until the year that I left–I tried several systems (including GR shelves), but none fit my needs like TC would have.  Too bad, as even with the half solutions, I had a fair amount of buy-in with my students as “librarians.”  Imagine what I could have done with a fully fleshed out check-in/check-out database that the students could have used with their Chromebooks–I would have probably had what I was looking for developing as a 6th grade language arts teacher–a class of readers who would also share my love for books and reading.

Well, that’s all for today–have a good day!

Sidney

Commodore 64 Nostalgia: Kung-Fu II: Sticks of Death (or Caveat Emptor)

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Kung Fu II: Sticks of Death (aka Fighting Warrior), Karateka with bo staff fighting ninja with a katana, Image Source: Stadium64

Despite the long name, I really don’t have all that much to say about Kung-Fu II: Sticks of Death as I barely remember it.  To be honest, I didn’t remember it at all until I pulled out the “reference card” and looked up images online.

Cover Art Bait and Switch

I’m sure the reason that I don’t remember it is that this is one of the first games that I had that helped teach me caveat emptor (“Let the buyer beware”).  If you look at the cover art of the game, it features a Bruce Lee “clone” fighting another man with a bo staff.  As I was into martial arts, having taken karate, I was always on the lookout for martial arts inspired games.  As my weapons were tonfa and the bo staff, this game seemed right up my alley.

Tonfa_BlackBeltMagbo_staff_BlackBeltMagAmazon.jpg

However, it was not be as the game, in truth, had little to do with modern day karatekas and ninjas than it does as an “ancient Egyptian brawler” where you fight ancient Egyptian men and “dog”-faced enemies.  Very disappointing.

Fighting Warrior Conundrum

Okay, after researching this game for this post, I now understand why the game looks as it does–it truly was “bait and switch.”  The game itself is called “Fighting Spirit” and is based on ancient Egyptian deities and monsters.  It doesn’t have a Wikipedia entry, but apparently it was renamed for the American market.  I’m assuming that the box art was attempt to cash in on the martial arts craze of the mid 80s with the popularity of movies like The Karate Kid.

As I didn’t really have the money in my allowance to subscribe to magazines per se (I just purchased them ad hoc every month and rarely the same type for variety’s sake), I wouldn’t have known that this game was not what it purported to be.

I barely remember playing it and what I do remember is that that it wasn’t very fun. And judging by the lack of buzz online (few YouTube videos, no Wikipedia entry, very few sites talking about it), it looks like I wasn’t the only one with that impression.

Sidney

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Commodore 64 Nostalgia Review: World Karate Championship

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World Karate Championship (aka International Karate) Commodore 64 Screenshot, Image Source: Wikipedia

So, World Karate Championship (Internation Karate in Europe), by Epyx was one of my favorite C64 games growing up.  I absolutely adored it and I am convinced (although I could be mistaken–I haven’t actually researched the development of the game to know for sure) that it and its competitor,  Data East’s, Karate Champ (which, in looking it up to verify the name, I discovered had sued Epyx claiming that the games were too similar, but apparently lost) had an influence on the modern fighter and games like the original Street Fighter as it exhibits many of the same characteristics–announcer, rounds, tournament fighting, etc., but in a “proto-form.”

The game is a traditional round-based fighting game.  It features a best two out of three system, but like a Karate tournament, you can have half-points (for smaller hits) and full points (for more devastating hits).  You can fight in different stages (areas) across the world, and has “bonus” stages in between the action in order to break bricks/boards for extra points.  What I liked at the time is that it had a belt system, and started your character at a white-belt and moved up through the rankings as you progressed, with higher colored belts meaning more difficult opponents.

I may have mentioned it before, but as someone who took martial arts and was interested in all things martial arts at the time, I took to this came right away.  The control scheme was its only downfall, as it only worked with one button and many of the moves had to be executed with a combination of the joystick and button and it was very imprecise and “sticky” compared to games like Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat which came along a little later and solved the “control” problem. That is why you see so many “misses” in the footage above.

My uncle and I used to have epic battles when playing two player against one another.  I’ll always remember the fun times I had while playing this game–and yes, that “soundtrack” did loop over and over constantly.  I’d forgotten just how repetitive the music was until I heard it on loop as I was writing this blog, but boy, does it bring back the memories.  And that’s sort of the point of this nostalgia reviews, isn’t it? 🙂

Have a great day!

Sidney

 

Commodore 64 Nostalgia Review: Super Cycle

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Animated Gif of Super Cycle, Man Racing on Motorcycle trying to avoid traffic and obstacles, Image Source: C64-Wiki

So, Super Cycle is one of my favorite games.  It isn’t my favorite game, but it up there.  I really enjoyed playing it and wish that the series had continued into present day.  It is a racing game (which, when done right, is always a crowd pleaser with me).  It featured racers on motorcycles who raced across the country in various settings.

It wasn’t anything too special and it wasn’t very unique.  It was just a motorcycle racer, in various environments (which were really just green for meadows, yellow for desert and bluish black for night), in which you raced the clock to get to the next checkpoint before time expired while avoiding other racers and obstacles on the side of the road.  It essence, it was a motorcycle “clone” of the very famous and very popular Pole Position video game (which was similar in design, but featured a “unrecognizable” jumble of pixels that was supposed to represent a Formula One/Indy car).

It didn’t have the depth as some of the racing games that I bought and enjoyed, but I always enjoyed putting the disk into the C64’s disk drive for a good while and I always remember that I had fun with it even when I wasn’t doing so well (crashing and the like).  I think the only thing that could have made it better for me would have been more stages/environments.  I think the C64 version topped at 3–meadows, desert, and night (although I could be mistaken).  Regardless, I don’t remember it being able to capture my attention long-term (for hours) because of the quickly repeating stages/courses.  Still, I remember it fondly and it is one of the reasons why I still gravitate to the racing genre in games even today.

Here is a YouTube Video for the game (ah, that intro music really brings me back) 🙂

The game was developed by Epyx, a studio that I don’t know too much about–they were never really profiled in magazines like hot new studios such as Electronic Arts (EA), Activision and Imagic were at the time (I suppose I can do a google search and report back on what I find at some point), however I remember the few games that I got from them–I know I have at least one more–their games were pretty good–always above average in terms of quality and fun factor.  Like Super Cycle, I wish they were still around and programming/producing games as a Design Studio.

Well, that’s all for today.  Have a great day!

Sidney
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